Ben Franklin, Scientist

Science, too, has a history, and Franklin was born at a critical moment in that his­tory. People have always struggled to understand the natural world. But only at the end of the seventeenth century did some Europeans begin to think that their ways of explaining nature were uniquely truthful. Men of science, including Newton, argued that their means of comprehending nature, particularly their experiments, were definitive. Much contested at the time (and since), this idea of science nevertheless stuck.

Franklin had an important place in this story, but it is now a surprisingly misunderstood one. Consider the following illustration. It is probably what most people think of when they see or hear the words “Benjamin Franklin” and “science”: a stout colonial character flies a kite in a Philadelphia thunderstorm. This image, which Nathaniel Currier and James Ives produced in 1876, even has a caption to explain that “Franklin’s Experiment” demonstrated “the identity of Lightning and Electricity,” from which “he invented the Lightning Rod.”

The illustration is charming, but it is wrong in many ways. In­deed, its very caption is inaccurate. Franklin’s kite experiment did not identify lighting with electricity. An earlier experiment of his had already done so—the kite verified the finding. And Franklin was trying to gauge whether clouds were electrified and, if so, whether with a positive or a negative charge. He wanted to deter­mine the presence of a particular kind of matter, electricity, within nature and to use it to investigate the characteristics of other kinds of matter. He was doing far more than playing with a kite, and it reduces his efforts considerably to describe them as resulting only in a clever device, the lightning rod.

The characters in the illustration, moreover, are not quite right. In this and many of the kite pictures that include Franklin’s son, William, the younger Franklin is depicted as a child, even though he was in his twenties at the time of the kite experiment. That he was often portrayed as a child may reflect a post-eighteenth-century suspicion that the only thing more ridiculous than a grown man flying a kite in the rain is two grown men doing so. Nor is it very helpful to think of Franklin as firmly planted in America, let alone as quintessentially American. That notion gives too local a view of him. Certainly, he was born, lived, and did his important electrical experiments in America. But he lived almost a third of his life abroad, in Europe. He published his account of his experiments in London, and the first important verification of the experiments came from Paris. Franklin was not situated in one place—he ended up everywhere, on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout his life, he looked to Europe (or went to Europe) for his education, books, ideas, and friends. Franklin deliberately chose to work in natural science—a decision intended to make himself part of a cosmopolitan, enlightened culture, one that impressed him at an early age as en­compassing everything America did not.

Yet we still retain an image of Franklin that is suspiciously like the Currier and Ives illustration. He is currently celebrated as an American statesman or a Founder, a politician who happened to do a little science on the side. But that description puts the cart before the horse. Franklin was not a statesman who did science. He became a statesman because he had done science. And he was able to do so because, in the eighteenth century, science became part of public culture. That was how someone who excelled in the sciences could become a public figure or even a celebrity. Franklin’s contemporaries recognized that this had been his route to prominence. A famous tag proposed that Franklin had snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from the tyrants—in that order.

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From the book The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (“the Work”) by Joyce E. Chaplin. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.

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